It is
clear from Behe's response on his Amazon blog to the negative reviews by Sean
Carroll and myself of The Edge of Evolution that he really wants to score
debating points, not to have a scientific discussion. I don't wish to engage in a protracted debate with Behe, but
let me respond to a few of his assertions. My comments are made in light of two other reviews that have
just appeared: Ken Miller's in Science, and Richard Dawkins's in Sunday's New
York Times book reviews.

Behe:

"The Coyne review is one very long
mishmash of ad hominem, argument from authority, misunderstanding, and question
begging. The ad hominem (questioning my motives, gratuitously citing folks who
disagree with me without saying why that's pertinent to my argument, and so on)
I will not reply to. The argument from authority is the most incomprehensible
part of his essay. Alluding to my participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania
court case of 2005, early in the review Coyne writes "More damaging than the
scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from
Judge John E. Jones III.

Wow, more damaging than scientific
criticisms?! Leave aside the fact that the parts of the opinion Coyne finds so
congenial (which are standard Darwinian criticisms of intelligent design) were
actually written by the plaintiffs' lawyers and simply copied by the judge into
his opinion. (Whenever the opinion discusses the testimony of any expert
witness -- for either side, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians --
the judge copied the lawyers' writing. Although such copying is apparently
tolerated in legal circles, it leaves wide open the question of whether the
judge even comprehended the abstruse academic issues discussed in his
courtroom.) Frankly, it's astounding that a prominent academic evolutionary
biologist like Coyne hides behind the judicial skirts of the former head of the
Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. If Coyne himself can't explain how Darwinism
can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a
non-scientist judge?"

Coyne:

Behe excoriates me for claiming that his defeat
(and that of intelligent design [ID]) in the Dover case was more damaging than
the scientific criticisms levelled at Darwin's
Black Box. His mistake here is
assuming that "victory" is more pressing in the scientific than in the social
arena. But it is Behe himself who
has chosen to take his challenge to the social arena, publishing his ideas in a
trade book and thereby bypassing the usual scientific route of having these
ideas adjudicated by his peers. Both Richard Dawkins (in his review of The Edge of Evolution in The New
York Times) and myself have noted Behe's remarkable reluctance to submit his
claims to peer-reviewed scientific journals. If Behe's theory is so world-shaking, and so indubitably
correct, why doesn't he submit it to some scientific journals? (The reason is obvious, of course: his
theory is flat wrong.)

Behe
has lost his case in the arena that matters most to all of us: the right of a
scientifically misguided -- and largely theological -- theory to be accepted as
science in public schools. (Remember that Behe wrote half of a chapter in the
second edition of the discredited textbook, Of Pandas and People, at issue in
the Dover trial). ID, irreducible complexity -- the whole lot of gussied-up
creationist claims -- have been found by the courts to be "not science". Behe's IDeas can't get a place
alongside evolution in the public schools. That is far more damaging than a few
critiques levelled in scientific journals and highbrow magazines.

It's
amusing to see Behe attacking me for ad hominem remarks, and then himself
engaging in the same tactic by denigrating Judge Jones. He questions whether Jones really
understood intelligent design at all, or simply adopted the plaintiff's claims
in the Dover case. In fact, it's
palpably clear from Jones's written opinion that he saw right through Behe and
his transparent creationism. And
you can bet that if the verdict had gone in favor of Behe's side, he wouldn't
be impugning Jones as "the former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control
Board."

Behe:

"At some points in his review, it's
hard to know whether Professor Coyne simply has a poor memory, or is so upset
with the book that he gets confused. He writes "For a start, let us be clear
about what Behe now accepts about evolutionary theory. He has no problem with a
4.5-billion-year-old Earth, nor with evolutionary change over time .... and
that all species share common ancestors." "Now accepts"? I made that plain in Darwin's Black Box over ten years ago.
Throughout the controversy of the past decade over ID, almost every time my
work had been cited in a newspaper or journal, it has been noted that I think
common ancestry is true. Yet apparently that comes as a surprise to Coyne."

Coyne:

As far as
I can see, Behe has indeed changed -- or at least strengthened -- his views on
evolution. The best he could say
about the idea of the common ancestry of organisms in Darwin's Black Box is that he found the idea "fairly convincing."
At the same time (and in other publications), Behe said that he saw no
convincing evidence for macroevolution: the transformation of one major form of
animal into another. (I was always puzzled at how Behe might accept common
ancestry but deny macroevolution.) Now, however, Behe is much stronger about these issues: in Edge of Evolution he baldly states that
"common descent is true." He now
admits macroevolution as well (i.e., humans and chimps share a common
ancestor), although he still claims that it's driven by God-given
mutations.

It
is important to draw the distinction between Behe and his fellow IDers, lest
people mistake ID for a monolithic theory accepted by all its proponents. Behe is one of the few
intelligent-design proponents who accepts common descent, macroevolution,
natural selection, and an old earth. This puts him severely at odds with his other ID colleagues at the
Discovery Institute, including William Dembski and Stephen Meyer.

Behe:

"The same question-begging is used to
"answer" my argument on protein binding sites, but with a special twist. Writes Coyne: "In fact, interactions
between proteins, like any complex interaction, were certainly built up step by
mutational step ... This process could have begun with weak protein-protein
associations that were beneficial to the organism. These were then strengthened
gradually..." So, reasons Coyne, we know protein binding sites developed
gradually by random mutation because we know proteins have binding sites. So
there!

The twist comes when Coyne claims
"Behe furnishes no proof, no convincing argument, that interactions cannot
evolve gradually." So, apparently to Darwinists, contrary observational
evidence doesn't count. Or perhaps Coyne somehow overlooked Chapter 7, where I
noted that in a hundred billion billion chances, no such interactions developed
in malaria. Or in HIV. Or in ten trillion opportunities in E. coli. I guess he
missed where I carefully reviewed the literature on new protein binding sites.
Where I showed the disconnected nature of random mutation in Chapters 3 and 4.
Well, I suppose if Coyne read The Edge of Evolution with his eyes firmly shut,
then he could have missed those discussions."

Coyne:

In a
venue like The New Republic, one
can't go too deeply into the niceties of probability theory, or technical
details about sequential evolution. Nevertheless, the point I made was clear, and has been further sharpened
by the reviews of Dawkins, Carroll, and Miller. Behe's arguments were specious for several reasons.

There is no evolutionary expectation
that complex protein-protein interactions will evolve in a parasite adapting to
a new drug. Any mutation that
improves fitness is acceptable, regardless of what it does.

Behe's probability calculations, on
which his entire argument rests, are flatly wrong because they assume that
adaptation cannot occur one mutation at a time. He uses chloroquine resistance of malaria (CQR) as an
example, saying that the parasite always must have two mutations arising
together to evolve resistance. As Ken Miller shows, this assumption is false,
because one of the two mutations that Behe claims are "required" for CQR is not
actually required (Chen et al. 2003, reference accidentally omitted from
Miller's piece). It is therefore
bogus to take the 1/1020 number as the estimate of the probability
of the evolution of a single binding site for CQR. And it is even more bogus to use this as a generic estimate
for the evolutionary probability of getting any protein-protein binding site.

The probability calculations are also
wrong because Behe's argument is based on specifying a priori exactly which
mutations have to occur to be adaptive: the identical pair of mutations that
occur in chloroquine-resistant malaria. He neglects the possibility (indeed,
the certainty) that many other mutations that cause interactions between
proteins and other molecules can also be adaptive.

Behe argues that the evolution of a
single protein-protein binding site requires more than 2 simultaneous
mutations -- more like 3-6 of them. He adduces no evidence for this major claim, nor does he give a single
example of any case in which two or more binding sites must evolve
simultaneously for an adaptation to arise. The reviews by Ken Miller in Nature and Sean Carroll in
Science cite several examples of the gradual origin of adaptations via the
step-by-step accumulation of point mutations in proteins.

Finally,
I note that Behe's "response" completely ignores two devastating criticisms of
his "scientific" theory. First, as
both Dawkins and I point out, if random mutations can't build complexity, how
can they possibly have been so effective in artificial selection of plants and
animals? Virtually anything you want to select in an animal or plant can be
selected: as Darwin said, "Breeders habitually speak of an animal's
organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they
please."/p>

Also, as
I pointed out in my review, Behe asserts quite plainly in his book that the
goal of the Designer was "intelligent life." I challenge him to provide a scientific rationale for this
conclusion, which he failed to do in his response. If his theory is indeed scientific, as he repeatedly claims,
let him give us the empirical evidence for this most interesting
hypothesis.